530 TBADING WITH THE ENEMY AND October The practice of trading under neutral flags led, as might have been expected, to a number of other abuses, less picturesque but no less grave than this. It was carried on in various ways. A merchant in the United Provinces might buy a ship in the name of a skipper who would then become naturalized in Den- mark or Sweden or Poland. He might sell a part -share in a ship to a Danish friend, who would then declare with the master that it was wholly Danish property and so gain the protection of the flag. Again, there might be a fictitious sale pro forma to an accomplice in Denmark or Sweden. 1 There were vessels manned and owned by Rotterdammers which sailed in this manner from Hamburg for the ' Greenland ' fishery, at any rate in the earlier part of the war, when only the Hamburgers and not the Dutch were sending guard-ships thither. 2 It was not the least of the objections to the ambiguous behaviour of Hamburg and the other imperial seaports that, besides trying to get for themselves the advantages of neutrality, they imitated the neutrals in undermining the loyalty of the Dutch to their own regulations. 3 Another kind of fraud against which, as we have seen, the English tried to provide was the passing off of French wine and brandy under other names. A pamphleteer tells us that * many avaricious Jews and others ' arranged the exporting of wine and brandy from French ports to San Sebastian, Bilbao, or Catalonia, where it was put into Spanish vats for export with a sworn declaration of Spanish origin. A declaration could be bought for a piece of eight, and, although this quarter of Spain could scarcely produce a hundred vats of brandy in a year, it was exporting a thousand. 4 An offence less easily detected was the dilution of Spanish with French wines and brandies, and appa- rently the states-general did not, as they had done in the last French war, prohibit the sale of all mixed liquors. 5 Officials were dishonest in identifying the local origins of wines and spirits. Altogether the wine-trade seems to have been but little hindered by the laws.. The neutral Portugal was a great entrepot for it, Barcelona and Bilbao no less. 6 The demand for a time-limit . . . rakende H belet van de sluykeryen, &c, and Res. Stat. Gen. 5/15 October 1689, 13/23 October 1690. Two suspected cases are mentioned in a memorial of the Dutch secretary Bade, 10/20 September 1692 (State Papers, For., For. Ministers, 21). 1 Kort vertoog door wat middelen en wegen de negotie op Vrankryk gedreven en staande gehouden werd, Amsterdam, 1691. See also Hop's dispatch to the griffier dated 17 October 1690, and another pamphlet, C. Indise Raven, Werd Hour Hog. Mog. de Heeren Staten Oeneraal . . . 't gevaar van te vallen onder de tyrannique maght der Francen . . . overgegeven, 1691. 2 Kort vertoog. In 1696 the admiralty college of Amsterdam added two guard- ships to the one of Hamburg (Res. Adm. Amsterd. 26 March /5 April 1696). 3 Middelen tot onfeylbare weeringe, p. 6. 4 Ibid. pp. 8-9. 5 Res. Stat. Gen. 10/20 April 1674. 6 Ibid. 21/31 October 1695.
